The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [42]
“Oh.” Fawn scratched the side of her nose with her pen. “He’s one of those, huh?”
“The Weevil is the one of those. He doesn’t know any programming. He’ll never know. He only wants to knows holes and vulnerabilities. He collects them for their own sake. He has long lists of them. And he tries them all, cookbook style. Manually! Look at him backspacing there.”
“Wow.”
“Twenty-four, thirty-six hours straight sometimes. Day after day. Weeks. From his laptop in the toilet,” said Jeb. “Did you ever see The Weevil, Van? He’s been raided about thirty times.”
“I saw a pic of him,” Van said. And of The Weevil’s den, or whatever one called that impossible, filthy hole where The Weevil lived. At the FCIC Reunion in Phoenix in ’96, they’d had a slide projector. They ran some slides of The Weevil’s raid photos during their beer bust. Van could still remember those computer cops howling.
“I met him once,” said Jeb, wincing at the memory. “In a halfway house in Tacoma. I just had to go see The Weevil. I mean, this was the bad guy who took control of over four thousand computers. Mostly federal. One by one. By hand. Even back then, he had carpal tunnel so incredibly bad . . .” Jeb paused thoughtfully. “I think they call that ‘degenerative osteoarthritis,’ really. Hands like two big hockey gloves.”
“No,” said Fawn.
“Yes, Fawn.” Jeb offered Fawn a gentle smile. That fatherly expression looked strange on Jeb’s big face, but Jeb had known Hyman Glickleister really well.
Fawn’s penny loafer scuffed the federal shag carpet in her doubt. “Really?”
“Yeah, Fawn, really. I’m not kidding.”
Fawn believed him. “So, uh, what do we do about a guy like that?”
“Well, he’s mentally ill. The FBI profiled him as extreme obsessive-compulsive, and . . .” A summary thought struggled to burst out of Jeb. “This is the face of our enemy,” he said at last. “I mean, he’s not al Qaeda, but he’s truly of that kind. There is just no reasoning with this guy. There’s no possible diplomacy we can use with him. There’s no compromise or common sense. We can’t scare him off, or buy him off, or give him anything that he wants. He’s got a value system so totally alien to ours that he’s like a Star Trek Borg.”
Van tugged at his beard, hard enough to pluck a whisker. “How does The Weevil even know we’re here? The only feed upstream of us is the NSA!”
“Man, I sure don’t like that,” Jeb said.
Van watched the screen. The Weevil was an awful typist. Small children typed better than The Weevil. He was, Van realized, using two fingers. Maybe two stumps.
Van had had two hours’ sleep and three pots of coffee, getting the alpha rollout of the Grendel system in shape. The project was turning out better than Van had imagined. In fact, it was working out in a rather interesting fashion. It was elegant and he was proud of it. Working with Grendel was worthy of his talents. The work was consuming him.
Van was living alone. He was under great pressure to perform. He was sore all over from lifting weights every night, so as to collapse and get some sleep in his cold, lonely, lumpy bed.
Then, as Grendel’s very first “guest,” way before any legitimate user ever logged on to admire Van’s handiwork, here he was already, instantly, this . . . creature. Of course The Weevil wasn’t getting anywhere against Van’s secure system. It was like watching a termite trying to chew through a concrete block. But, as long as it just kept chewing, chewing . . .
“We’ve got to get rid of this guy,” he realized.
“He’ll never get inside Grendel.” Jeb shrugged. “He’s a lunatic.”
Van lowered his voice. “We have got to get rid of him just because he is him and we are us.”
“Good people have already tried that,” said Jeb. “Any district attorney takes just one look at The Weevil. It’s like: you want me to put THAT in front a jury? It’s almost blind! It has no hands! It can’t even talk. It’s never held a job in its life. It has no life. I’m not even sure it can read.”
“How does he eat?” said Fawn.
“He’s got some kind of family in Canada. They